Feminist theater grew out of the wider Political theater of the 1970s, and continues to the present. It can take on a variety of meanings, but the constant thread is the lived experience of women.
History
Various women's theaters started up in the 1970s and 1980s, an outgrowth of the political and social activism of the times. Early leaders included Michelene Wandor, Martha Boesing, Caryl Churchill and The Women's Theater Group in London. During the 1970s and 1980s, feminist or women's theater was a specific, new type of theater. Since then, the theater genre itself has opened itself up to women's viewpoints. Some felt that it was no longer necessary to have a separate genre, because of increased parity. Many groups folded. However, even with that increased parity, men's roles continue to outweigh women's roles in mainstream theater, and the situations and challenges facing women continue to be severe. There are currently a large number of theaters again that are either explicitly feminist, explicitly women's theaters, or that define themselves as inclusive of women's perspectives specifically.
Variability
Feminist theater defies definition because, by its nature, it is about breaking boundaries and experimentation. Catherine Castellani says, "Historical play, science fiction, any class, any race, experimental or straight-forward, there is no formula for a feminist play because there is no formula for how to be human."
Global
The Women's Movement resulted in feminist theatre around the U.S., in England, and in other parts of the world in the 1970s, and it has continued to be a global genre ever since. One of the earliest feminist theatre's in England was the SphinxTheatre Company. Another theater in Adelaide that started in the 1970s also called itself the Women's Theatre Group. The oldest feminist theatre in the United States is Spiderwoman Theatre, a Native American Theatre founded in 1976. There are numerous feminist theatre companies around the globe, and although most tend to be situated in major Western cities, the majority of them produce works based in the intersections of women of color and LGBTQ women. Some of them also raise money for prevention of violence against women. Some examples include the Manhattan Shakespeare Project, La Luna Productions, LezCab, Women Center Stage Festival, and Teatro Luna. Numerous theatres tend to focus on specific cultural performance traditions, such as La Luna Productions, which does modern works with primarily female characters, but uses the Japanese theatrical style Kabuki.
Challenges
Feminist theatre faces internal and external challenges, starting with variable meanings of the word feminist. Since its onset, there have been additional direct challenges relating to funding, media backlash, and fit within existing theater contexts. Third wave feminism had different goals and methods than second wave feminism. The goals of feminist theatre continue to be extreme, including exploration of social injustices and inequalities in order to identify transformative possibilities and solutions. Today, gender privilege and bias continue to be both the subject and the challenge for feminist theatre.
